Tag Archives: Card games

Leo has been very interested for some time in giant numbers. (You think googolplex is big?…wait until you meet Graham’s and Rayo’s numbers! … Go ahead, look ’em up! 🙂 )

So, this morning Leo spontaneously made up a card game that’s a little like the War card game (he was a little vague on the specific rules), where instead of a standard deck of cards, you have cards that he created with real giant numbers on them.

Leo’s first grade class has a group project to create stores to sell products that they make in their makerlab. Leo’s team (he and two pals) have chosen to make and (try to) sell Pokemon cards. We actually haven’t encouraged Leo in playing Pokemon; we’re torn about it basically being a physical analog of the sort of video-games that we pretty much don’t let him play.

Since this store project requires the kids to actually make the things they sell, they can’t just become a Pokemon reseller. But, as just mentioned, Leo has been making his own pseudo-Pokemon cards for some time, so I had the idea to create a whole new science-based Pokemon.

Pause…. Simultaneous with all this, Leo has become fascinated with dangerous chemistry, like explosives and poisons, and so on. I think that this comes from his reading Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, which involves a wide variety of comical evil-doings.

Anyway, so this gave me the common ground from which we created Poke-Chem!

Too briefly, the way Poke-Chem works is that you have cards that represent the common elemental molecules (like O2, H2, etc.), and then rules of combination (reactions, obviously) that enable them to combine to create molecules that have either healthful properties (like water), or damaging properties (like ammonia). Here’s are some of the elemental molecules:

And here’s the table of costs, reactions, and so forth:

Note that even with these few elements you can get all the way to TNT via Benzene, thence Toluene, thence TNT!

One of the cleverest parts of this is that not only can you make healthful molecules like water, and damaging ones like TNT, but you can also bank you money and gain interest by buying and holding gold (Au), silver (Ag), or platinum (Pt). Here’s the part of the table that gives the compounding rates for these:

and we spent a great deal of time experimenting with the compound algebraic interest formula to get these into a sensible zone for the rules of the game.

Next time we may get into what really happens with commodity markets! 🙂

I made up a math card game today that was pretty clever (if I do say so myself! 🙂 ) with the intention of playing it with Leo, but it turned out to be so hard that even I couldn’t play it!

First remove the face cards and jokers from a standard deck, leaving only the numbers (and ace = 1). Shuffle, and deal four cards to each player.

Unlike most games, this one is collaborative — the players work together to reach the goal. That goal being for both players to make the same final number from each of the set of four random numbers that you’ve been dealt, using standard arithmetic operations (and including forming a number out of separate digits, for example, making 1 and 2 into 12 or 21).

(Actually, the game is much easier if you can make a zero, like Player B can above, as 2-2, because that lets you drop out as many values a you like through multiplication by zero. Probably trivial operations like multiplication by zero, shouldn’t be allowed.)

Unfortunately, the game is way too hard. Leo was actually pretty good at doing the calculations, but the search problem of finding the same number among the tens of thousands of possible combinations of arithmetic operations is just way too hard. In fact, I ended up writing a program to solve the problems exemplified above!

There are some easy cases, like the zero I mentioned above, that enable you to simplify, but in playing about five hands, we managed to not get even a single one…even when I was doing all the work of searching for a solution.

We play pattern poker (although I don’t call it poker!) Here’s a three-way game:

It’s slightly analogous to Texas Hold’em: Deal two cards in the middle, then two to each player. The player with the best pattern wins. You can play for M&Ms or whatever you like. “Best pattern” means more-or-less what it means in 5-card poker. You can make up your own rules. (In fact, we use slightly different rules every time we play, because, of course, we make them up on the fly. Sometimes Leo catches me making up a rule that we didn’t use before, and we have to negotiate!)